> “Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, 
  > cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God’s Earth, and 
  > very little escapes their notice.”

i wonder if this is because their lizard brain hasn't yet been trained to filter what's important vs what isn't.

i find myself constantly questioning little details in my codebase like, "why do we thread a request all the way through the business logic" and i think the reason i catch these things, is because my brain hasn't become complacent with this style through 15 years of solving low level problems in C. all sorts of things jump out at me as accidental complexity that the most senior guys don't even notice. i think it's because it didn't used to be important, or maybe its not important to them because they wrote it over years and are already familiar, but it sure is important when you're trying to scale your team and they're facing a brick wall of code needing to be understood for every single little defect.

this complacency is why big codebases get so noisy that you can't see the nuances of requirements in a code review. it's not possible to ask high level questions like < http://www.dustingetz.com/how-to-read-code > without aggressively abstracting away all non-essential complexity. breaking experienced people out of this complacent tolerance for accidental complexity, as we tackle higher and higher complexity, is a really hard problem.